Harvard Lampoon

The Lampoon's office is a castle settled between two streets in Cambridge. The castle is an architectural oddity, made with a hodgepodge of materials deriving from all parts of the globe. Its furniture was built inside and is too large to be removed. Its tables are so large that people dance atop them at Lampoon parties. On top of the castle, there is a metal ibis.

The Lampoon has an ongoing rivalry with the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's daily newspaper. (That rivalry is the reason the furniture is unremovable and the ibis is now welded down.) At the height of the cold war, the Crimson stole the ibis and gave it to the Soviet Union's Ambassador to the United States as a "gift from the students of America." The Lampoon was forced to make several calls to the State Department before an unhappy diplomat was sent to the Soviets to ask for its return.

For its part, the Lampoon once erected barbed wire around its perimeter and announced that it had seceded from the United States and would no longer pay taxes or abide by its laws. Again the State Department was involved when a representative was sent to inform the Lampoon that it would not, in fact, be allowed to secede.

The Lampoon funds its activities largely through royalties from National Lampoon movies and donations from alumni.

The Lampoon is divided into three departments: art, literature, and business. The art and literature departments produce the cartoons and gags for their occasionally published magazine, while the business department sells ads and begs alumni for money. As in many other extracurricular activities at Harvard, the process of joining the Lampoon is known as a "comp". Compers for the art and literature departments must go through three cuts over the course of a semester, writing or drawing many pieces for perusal and scornful dismissal by the current members, and it is rumoured that business compers must raise ten thousand dollars.